Scavengers E3 trailer shows off first gameplay footage

The ice age starts later this year.

Scavengers is a cooperative—and frequently competitive—survival game set during a new ice age. It revealed some early gameplay in its E3 trailer, which you can watch above, and if you fancy braving the chilly climate and the other potentially unfriendly survivors, you can sign up for playtests starting this year.

There aren't enough balmy survival games, and frankly I'm not sure how many more frozen wastelands I can take, but Scavengers does sound a bit different from a lot of its survival contemporaries.

Your goal is to survive the deadly environment, gather resources and get back up into space where it's nice and safe. OK, nicer and safer. But while your group is doing this, other groups are trying to do the same, competing for slim resources. Everyone can work together for the common good, or teams can stalk around the map like dastardly rogues, stealing everyone's hard won stuff.

There's a dynamic weather system, map events and plans for a changing meta and various challenges, encouraging players to fight or work together more, with cosmetic rewards and XP potentially being doled out at the end.

When James played in December, he thought it was a promising survival-competitive shooter hybrid, though what he got to see was just the basic foundations. And it sounds like a capable anecdote machine.

"Within the span of just a few matches, I was saved by the someone I terrorized, counter-ambushed in an dilapidated cathedral (a story for another time), and used a bear, a single bear, as a weapon in an online multiplayer game with great success. And that's a dream come true."